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His head came up.

She had not meant to say it like this, in this room, with the chest between them and his face like that. It came out because anything more carefully chosen would have concealed the reason any of this mattered. Now it stood plainly in the room. She would not take it back.

“I love you,” she said again. “I want a life here with you. I want the room we share and the mornings you come to find me in the conservatory. And yes. I still want children. Someday. I am not asking you to promise me anything now. I only want to know that you can imagine it. That somewhere in your head there is a future with me in it that does not end in that corridor.”

He said nothing. She saw him want to look away and refuse himself.

“You told me,” she said, “not to stop imagining a future because you were afraid of it. By the fire, with the book in your hand. And before we ever lay together, I told you a child might come of it, and you said you knew. You said you wanted me all the same.”

He stared at her. She watched him recognize the words. For a moment she thought they would bring him back, that he would soften as he had by the fire, with the rain on the window.

His face closed.

“I did not think you would believe me.”

He said it so quietly that she almost missed it. Then it reached her and went into her like ice.

“What did you think I would do?” she said. “When you told me that. What did you think I would do?”

He did not answer. His jaw tightened, and the silence between them seemed only to make him angrier.

“I cannot live like this,” she said. “I cannot spend our whole marriage afraid of your grief. Afraid to say a word about the future in case it sends you back into your study for ten days. I cannot…”

“Then do not!” It came out of him in a shout. “Do not live like this! I warned you. I told you the day you came, I told you in the carriage, I told you upstairs on my knees. I do not want children. I made this a white marriage for a reason, and you would not leave it alone, you pushed and pushed until I…” He stopped, his chest heaving. “What do you want from me, Lydia? Do you want me to stand outside that door again? Do you want me to listen to you scream for eleven hours and then hold your dead child in a corridor? Is that the future you want me to imagine?”

“Tristan…”

“Because I can imagine it. I imagine it every night. I lie beside you and count the days and imagine it.” His voice cracked. “I cannot risk losing another woman I love. I cannot. I will not. I would rather you hated me.”

The words were out before he heard them. Lydia saw the moment he did. Love. He had said love, in a shout, in the middle of a quarrel, as if it were the worst thing he had to tell her. And he had offered it as a reason to shut her out.

She held his gaze. Her voice came low and steady.

“You do not get to decide that risk for me.”

“I am your husband.”

“Yes. You are my husband. That gives you no right to lock me away like something of hers in a box. It is my life, and my body, and my choice, and you do not get to make it for me simply because you are frightened.” Her eyes burned. She did not let the tears fall. “You can tell me what you want. You can tell me what you fear. You can ask me to wait, and I will wait. But you cannot invite me into your life and then lock every door that asks you to trust me.”

For a moment she thought she had reached him. His face moved. Something in it broke open, and beneath it she saw the man from the floor of her bedroom, the one who had wept against her neck.

Then he turned away.

“I should never have married you,” he said.

She stood still.

He walked past her to the door without looking at her. He opened it and went out, and she heard his boots cross the hall, and the front door, and his voice on the steps calling for his horse.

Lydia stood beside the chest. She looked down at the painted flowers on the lid, the worn place at the front where another woman’s hands had opened it, and she put out her hand and touched it, lightly, because she did not know what else to do.

Amelia found her there a quarter of an hour later. She did not ask Lydia to retell the quarrel. Tristan had ridden north toward the hunting lodge, she said, and had refused Sebastian’s offer to follow.

“Would you like us to stay?” she asked.

Lydia had to think. She wanted Amelia’s company more than she could say. She did not want their visit to become a vigil, everyone waiting for Tristan to come back.

“No. Thank you. You have the baby, and the journey will be easier before dark.”